Every submission reporting a research must include a statement to verify that ethics approval was sought for the study (or a statement that it was not required and why), including the name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s), the reference number/ID of the approval(s), and a statement that participants gave informed consent before participating. Even when a study has been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors may ask authors for more detailed information about the ethics of the work. Also, research involving human subjects, human tissue, or human data must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. Submissions may be declined if the journals’ editors come to conclusion that a research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. The editors may also contact the institutions’ ethics committee for further information in certain cases.

Allegations of publication misconduct, both before and after publication will be carefully inspected and we reserve the right to contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if necessary. If a conclusive evidence of misconduct is noticed, proper steps will be taken to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.

Authors are assumed that they are aware of publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests and compliance with standards of research ethics. In cases of suspected misconduct, COPE standards and practices will be followed.

Patient consent

Any item submitted to the journals published by ARAS PART MEDICAL INT PRESS that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires patient’s explicit consent before it can be published. Consequently; all studied patients are required to sign an informed consent form after reading the studies’ information sheet.

If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced in a study, then publication will be possible only if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the person nor anyone else could identify the individual with certainty.

If the patient is dead the authors should seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable, the journals will balance the worth whileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offence in decision to publish a submitted paper.

Images—such as x-rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body—may be used without consent so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patients’ identity.

Research involving animals

Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The Basel Declaration outlines fundamental principles to adhere when conducting research on animals and the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) has also published ethical guidelines.

For experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also document informed consent from the client or owner and adherence to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care.

Trial registration

Based on the ICMJE recommendations a clinical trial is defined as “any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect, relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome.”

In agreement with the ICMJE’s recommendations, all journals published by ARAS PART MEDICAL INT PRESS will not consider reports of clinical trials unless they were registered prospectively before recruitment of any participants.

As a condition of consideration for publication, journals published by the ARAS PART MEDICAL INT PRESS require registration of all trials in a public registry of trials approved by the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/index.html).

The trial registration number and the date of registration should be included in the last line of the submission abstract.

Standards of reporting

Authors are encouraged to use the reporting guidelines created by the EQUATOR Network when preparing their manuscript. Authors should adhere to these guidelines when drafting their manuscript, and reviewers will be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating such studies. These guidelines are listed as follows:

A competing interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain, —employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert—testimony or personal relationship). There is nothing unethical about a competing interest but it should be acknowledged and clearly stated. All authors must declare all competing interests in their covering letter and in the “Conflict of Interests” section upon submission. Where authors have no competing interests, the statement should read “The author(s) declare(s) that they have no competing interests with regards to authorship and/or publication of this article.” The Editor may ask for further information relating to competing interests.

Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and will be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

Financial competing interests

Financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):

Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the manuscript, either now or in the future.

Holding, or currently applying for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.

Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.

Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, should declare these as competing interests on submission. They should also adhere to the Good Publication Practice guidelines for pharmaceutical companies (GPP2), which are designed to ensure that publications are produced in a responsible and ethical manner.

Authorship changes

Any change in authorship (i.e. order, addition, and deletion of authors) after initial submission must be approved by all authors. Authors should determine and come to an agreement about the order of authorship among themselves. In addition, any alterations must be clarified to the editor. In line with COPE guidelines, our publisher requires written confirmation from all authors that they agree with any proposed changes in authorship of submission(s) or published item(s).

Authorship

The ICMJE recommends the authorship to be based on the following 4 criteria:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.

Final approval of the version published.

Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their coauthors. All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding, the gathering of data, technical help, writing assistance, and general supervision of the research group does not warrant authorship. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. Please guarantee that anyone stated in the Acknowledgements section has granted its clearance for permission to be listed.

Authorship Changes

Any change in authorship (ie, order, addition, and deletion of authors) after initial submission must be approved by all authors. Authors should determine the order of authorship among themselves. In addition, any alterations must be clarified to the Editor/Editor-in-chief. In line with COPE guidelines, our journal requires written confirmation from all authors that they agree with any proposed changes in authorship of submission(s) or published item(s). This confirmation must be via direct email from each author. It is the corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that all authors confirm they agree with the proposed changes. If there is disagreement amongst the authors concerning authorship and a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached, the authors must contact their institution(s) for a resolution. It is not the journal editor’s responsibility to resolve authorship disputes. A change in authorship of a published article can only be amended via publication of an Erratum.

The Peer-Review System, Policy and Confidentiality

An essential part of any publication process is the peer-review process. In this process the reviewers not only give their scientific view on an article, but also recommend points for improving the quality of the article. In this way the submitted articles are refined to such an extent that are published as a logical and scientifically approved article in a journal. As a general view; it is the responsibility of the journals to offer an effective peer-review system. The aims of this publisher for peer-reviewing are of high standard and quality. Peer-review process selects papers of significant scientific interest. This publisher expects referees to not only confirm the novelty of a manuscript but also to identify the bad features and mistakes. In addition, reviewers are encouraged to suggest points for improving the submitted article. Detection of fraud and plagiarism is of utmost significance to the editors of this journal. The goal of the publisher is to publish a well written, scientifically approved manuscript which is of value for the scientific community and society.

As a peer-review policy, all reviewers are requested to keep the submitted manuscripts and any associated data confidential. However if a reviewer seeks advice while assessing a manuscript, he/she must ensure that confidentiality is maintained and that the names of any such colleagues must be provided to the journal as soon as possible. This publisher makes its utmost effort to keep the content of all submitted manuscripts confidential until they are published.

Our journal accepts manuscripts report novel findings, which could result in impacts on in all fields of women’s health and reproduction science based on its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Hence, it offers an exceptionally fast publication schedule including prompt peer-review by the experts in the field and immediate publication upon acceptance. Quality and topic of submitted manuscript beside the priority of research field are the least considered criteria in each manuscript before entering in formal review process.

Editorial Review and Publication

All submissions to the journal go through a double-blind peer-review process to ensure content quality. At the first stage, an internal staff checks format and style of manuscript to assure that it is suitable to go through the normal peer review process. If authors have not considered the guides, the manuscript will be sent back to authors for compatibility.

The manuscript will be then assigned to section editors and bio-statistician editors based on the subject area for a fast pre-review screening within 1 week. Section editors check the manuscript for content quality (with a focus on methodology, originality, statically and contribution to knowledge and practice). Our editor will assign the manuscript to a number of external reviewers when it is suitable for consideration and adherences the scope of the journal. The reviewers will then handle their comments on the manuscript together with one of the following options to the Editor:

Accept 2. Minor Revision 3. Major Revision 4. Reject 5. If the decision is Minor Revision or Major Revision, authors have 45 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. Authors may contact email address if they require an extension. 6. Upon resubmission, the Editor may choose to send the manuscript back to external reviewers, or may render a decision based on personal expertise.

3- Managing editor receives the reviewers’ comments and sends them along with decision letter to corresponding author. Final decision on each manuscript will be made by the Editor-in-Chief.

As our journal is a rapid response journal, the review process takes between 2 to 6 months.

Plagiarism

Journals published by our publisher use iThenticate software, which is a plagiarism detector verifying the originality of the submission content before publication. If plagiarism is identified, we will follow COPE guidelines.

Directly copying text from other sources

Copying ideas, images, or data from other sources

Reusing text from your own previous publications

Using an idea from another source with slightly modified language

If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the submission may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we reserve the right to issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate. We reserve the right to inform authors' institutions about plagiarism detected either before or after publication.

Retractions

IJWHR follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and also refers to the ICMJE advice on Corrections, Retractions and "Expressions of Concern" as well as on Overlapping Publications.

Corrections and retractions

Rarely, it may be necessary for ARAS PART MEDICAL INT PRESS to publish corrections to or retractions of articles published in its journals to maintain the integrity of the academic record. In line with accepted norms of the academic community, corrections to, or retractions of published articles will be made by publishing an Erratum or a Retraction article, without altering the original article in any way other than to add a prominent link to the Erratum/Retraction article. The original article remains in the public domain and the subsequent Erratum or Retraction will be widely indexed. In the exceptional event that material is considered to infringe certain rights or is defamatory, we may have to remove that material from our site and archive sites.

Permissions

It is the author’s responsibility to secure all permissions prior to publication. Any written or illustrative material that has been or will be published elsewhere must be duly acknowledged and accompanied by the written consent of the Copyright holder (this may be the publisher rather than the author). This includes your own previously published material, if you are not the copyright holder.

Research misconduct

All research involving humans (including human data and human material) and animals must have been carried out within an appropriate ethical. If there is suspicion that research has not taken place within an appropriate ethical framework, the editor may reject a manuscript and may inform third parties, for example, author(s)’ institution(s) and ethics committee(s).

Self-archiving policy

Submitted articles

The authors submitting articles to our journal are prohibited from publishing the submitted material in an open repository before peer-review and publication in the journal. However, websites registering clinical trials are exempt from this prohibition.

Accepted article

The authors are permitted to archive their corrected manuscript in open access sources after acceptance in the journal. we encourage authors to link the final PDF version of their article via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

CrossMark policy

CrossMark is a multi-publisher initiative to provide a standard way for readers to locate the current version of a piece of content. By applying the CrossMark logo, IJWHR is committing to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur.

Clicking on the CrossMark logo at the top of each IJWHR article in PDF will tell you the current status of a document and may also give you additional publication record information about the document. Based on our policy, we will apply the COPE Policies on Retraction Guidelines when published content needs to be considered.

For more details on CrossMark, please refer the CrossMark website at the following link: